Not only man builds himself a shelter. Utters to make himself understood. Uses devices. Recognizes himself in the mirror. Lies. And yet only a human being has the will to be someone other than he is. He paints himself, dresses himself, works out, commits suicide. Even artifacts decoupled from the body serve a magical and thus not only gratifying, but manipulating function for them and other beings. The more people accomplish in the world, the more they understand themselves as devices whose exteriors are to be designed for the greatest possible functionality—versatile and clean.
Even for festivities, they paint their faces only decently. The art that they buy or look at in exhibitions and theaters is indulged more extravagance because they don’t need to look at it constantly and consider it largely irrelevant. It is only when machines operate increasingly in secret and require hardly any human assistance, but by contrast are capable not only of repairing human beings, but also reconfiguring them, that man’s appearance breaks free of man as machine. Until then, actors can become so popular that every aspect of their private lives is of interest, and yet they can only achieve lasting fame as part of orchestrations generally developed by others. Despite all of the radical boundary violations in visual art, one thing remains absolutely clear: It is nothing that one sticks somewhere, rubs in, or slips on. Not, perhaps, because it would then be used up too quickly, as there has long been art that gradually decomposes or requires regular restoration. But while visual art decorates houses, body decoration, at least as soon as it is worn, is always only craft. Antje Majewski doesn’t allow these boundaries to apply. As a collector, she stores opulent clothing and fabric just as carefully as photos and paintings, but they are also worn by herself and friends.
As an artist, she not only paints and films, but also designs the makeup and many of the clothing items related to her underlying orchestrations. When she later sells the paintings, but not the clothes that appear in her videos, then it is not because she sees the latter as a lesser artwork, but because they will continue to be worn as part of her personal collection. For the typical collector, this can be enforced only conceptually at best. Whether Antje Majewski paints people in their everyday appearance or a staged one, she subordinates herself. Whatever can be seen stays with the people. They are the actual images whose real presentation is only a fleeting one. Even on the photos used for the paintings, they are only snapshots. Painted by Majewski, the visible seems plastic and contrived. The weekend 
mountain climbers, the museum visitor in a fur coat, the carnival, the temporarily settled vagrant—the human pursuit of self-design is everywhere. Contemporary art, on the other hand, is an epiphenomenon claiming eternity. In the exhibition Mal de ojo (2005) and the dance theater piece Skarbek (2005), objects appear prominently for the first time. Treasures of the earth come alive and plastic stools, curtain, and lamp—painted on a smooth, slick piece of fiberboard, smeared and scratched—become the relentlessly waiting undead. Elsewhere, the Xoloitzcuintles, Mexican hairless dogs, already resemble weathered sculptures, and the actor Kaveh Parmas plays a dead man. Like in animism, there is no essential difference between that which is living and the things. This lunacy can also befall animals (cats become enamored of catnip), and yet its systematization into the “evil eye” made art possible, and is conveyed to non-believers as only art. Majewski retraces a possible beginning on herself and re-pierces an earhole from her teenage days. The painting Entrance to Crystal Palace (2002) shows a sphinx that once adorned the entrance to the Crystal Palace in London, the eyes of which had been painted red by a stranger.
Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus seen in Venus (1997) was slashed by a suffragette in 1914. The Egyptian mummies in Majewski’s The Royal Mummies (2006) were supposed to stay concealed forever, but their wrappings were sliced open by researchers. People not only mask and uncover themselves, but also artifacts, and develop new relationships with them. What once evoked reverence is now referred to only casually and vice versa. In the video No School Today (2005), a child lets an adult move through his high-rise apartment according to new rules. In Dekonditionierung (2008), five actors and lay people distill essential human 
behavioral patterns, such as power and closeness. Majewski’s pictures, painted as part of the film’s set design, are like everyday décor that the actors can either engage with or ignore. Then in the exhibition, film and paintings stand together as equals. The paintings step forward or the plot steps back as likewise art. In Säule Wedding (2008), Antje Majewski and Juliane Solmsdorf stand together on a 
defective drinking water fountain in front of the entrance to the Berlin subway station Pankstraße. The artists erect a memorial to themselves in their own lifetimes. But holding onto the column quickly becomes a struggle, and every other passerby can climb onto it for a few minutes, or, like the two artists in the film Erde Asphalt Wedding (2007), only crawl forward. Time and again, the task of art was supposed to be to find the absolute correct forms, and, in doing so, echo man’s own mortal and finite measure. This belief has waned. What remains are official norms for how wide an airplane seat should be and how high an apartment should be or how brightly a billboard may shine. But these ordinances are arbitrary, because every single person can decide again for himself at any time what is for him too small, too big, too bright, or too dark. Majewski wants to explore the mutability of this measure in a series— a single image that she will paint over and over again while under the influence of various drugs.
Drugs are the only things, in the course of a human history piled with an inconceivable number of things, that have lost hardly any of their transcending effect on the everyday. They do not surround man, but penetrate him.
The same could also be said of Majewski’s ideal of an art that, like in the short story The Winter Market by William Gibson, is transmitted directly from one brain to another. As a mask turned inward, it is no longer perceptible to the senses and could, in the most extreme case, completely obscure the other stimuli—man would lose himself in his own mutability. But what interests Majewski about a directly transmittable art is less the totality than the precision. At the beginning of her career, she toyed with the idea of locking the exhibition visitors in by surprise to defy the meaninglessness of contemporary art. It wasn’t long before she realized that she wanted more. She should succeed in no less than a splendor, the measure of which can be seen in a Velázquez, Vermeer, or likewise the spectacles of a forest stroll.
Text by Ingo Niermann
Publication Antje Majewski – My Very Gestures Edited by Hemma Schmutz, Caroline Schneider November 2008, English/German |